Re: WM standards

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Carlos Pereira wrote:

> For some serious work, to have a 99% full screen, with
> a little button visible, or to have 90% full screen,
> with a whole window bar visible is basically the same:
> unusable. The only thing that really matters is 100%
> full screen.

Agreed, this is important for some applications.  Office's floating
toolbar approach would be better than IE6's fixed buttons for those
apps, as you can close the toolbar and leave yourself with a true full
screen.

(Also, in Windoze when you press F10, the menu bar only appears until
you select a menu item-- then it disappears again.)

> Good point, but all these cases are less critical
> (in this context) that a 100% full screen mode,
> because you can always add some sort of visual
> clue, at very least you can try to kill the app,
> launch a xterm, wathever, but when you have a
> screen completely black... (and your 3-button mouse
> cannot/should not pop up advice menus, because
> it is rotating, scaling, moving objects in the
> 3D full screen) 

Heh... somebody needs to design a better mouse UI for your app-- I
worked on engineering visualization software once that used all three
buttons for scaling/rotation in full-screen mode too, but we still
managed to work it so that pop-up menus were available on a
right-click... plus of course anyone who's using such an app seriously
ought to be using a Spaceball or something anyway :)

Anyway, whatever the final decision on shortcuts, I think apps should
generally support more than one way of getting into/out of full screen
mode-- *only* being able to do something with a keyboard shortcut isn't
any more usable than *only* being able to do it with the mouse.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems